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Harnessing Your Creativity 163

MAKING CONNECTIONS

There are very few really new ideas. Most of the time they are
creative combinations of existing ideas:

The idea of the wheel + the invention of steel + the invention of
steam power = the railway.
The letter + the wordprocessor + the modem = email.
The radio + the cassette player + a set of headphones = the Sony
Walkman.
The idea of a very big bookshop + the internet = Amazon.com.
Our tendency to leave everything to the last second + the idea of
the one-stop shop + the internet = Lastminute.com.
The idea of the university + new technologies = the virtual or cor-
porate university.
The old way of washing clothes with a mangle and a scrubbing
board + modern technology with two tubs rotating in opposite
directions = the latest Dyson washing machine.

As MIT’s Nicholas Negroponte puts it:

New ideas come from differences. They come from having different
perspectives and juxtaposing different theories.

American poet Robert Frost has it even more succinctly: “An idea is
a feat of association.”
Will Hutton, chief executive of the Industrial Society,
expands on this further:

I have the kind of mind which makes connections. Nothing is original. I
am self-confident in making unusual links. You need to dare to make a
connection and be prepared for hostile reactions as you take people into new
territory.

To make it more likely that people will make connections and
therefore have good ideas that will be commercially and socially